As I write, I’m snuggled in my artist cabin The Hawk’s Nest in the Appalachian mountains surrounded on all sides by the a snowfall that most news sources report is the most Tennessee has seen in over a decade. Stunning panoramic beauty. Pissarro would call it “winter effect”.
Just finished a long walk along one of our trails—an uphill path that leads deep into the woods along the ridge of Turkey Knob to Moonshine Springs. So named because moonshiners used the artesian water to make their version of mountain dew, hooch, white lightning, firewater, rotgut, tipple—I could go on. Looking down the mountain you can barely see Slaughter Holler through the bare winter trees. You can’t make these names up, folks.
For me, today (and hopefully tomorrow and the remainder of my tomorrows) is about slowing down. It is not something I do naturally. The deep snow forced the issue. I want life to be about seeing, tasting, feeling, hearing, smelling the same thing again and again, really savoring it, making love to it. With no rush to find out what happens next. About really feeling one experience rubbing against another, one sense giving way to another, and seizing the moment of that diffusion between this minute, the next, the next.
We only have a few trails open at Kalien as of yet, and I was afraid I would get bored after a while, but the repeated daily walks bring new and unexpected gifts. Today I couldn’t help but think of fairies as I watched hundreds of tiny birds flitting playfully through the trees, glinting silver and white in the snowy sunlight.
Winter traditionally has not been my friend. In the words of Andrew Peterson,
The sky in Nashville, it can bend you low, ‘Cause the winter here is gray without a trace of snow.
But somehow, life with Gina, life here at Kalien—and yes, a trace of snow, are gradually changing that. Hailing from the eternal warmth and blue skies of Florida, Gina revels in the gray hues of winter and she sees all the beauty that I’ve missed growing up here—taking it for granted. Winter brings her delicious delight instead of my usual dreaded depression and her rejoicing is contagious and healing. And unlike Nashville, the sky is not low and gray here at Kalien—it is higher and lighter somehow. Gina calls our evening time here a “bright night’. Even the darkness seems lighter somehow. I suppose there is no light anywhere unless one can see it.
Today in the snow I noticed—perhaps for the first time—that instead of a bleak midwinter barrenness, the forest was teaming with life. Dainty hyperactive nuthatches, sassy spastic sparrows, brilliantly coiffed cardinals, and enterprising yellow-bellied sapsuckers busily lapping up leaking sap and trapping insects with their brush-tipped tongue. Animal tracks everywhere. One deer swimming and frolicking through the subaqueous snow as it leapt for the protection of heavy brush. A perfectly symmetrical wiry black spider suspended above the stark white of the snow as if performing a trapeze act. Life instead of barrenness. Delight rather than depression. Brightness overtaking darkness. Present releasing past.
To paraphrase Andrew’s lyric:
And you knew they would hate you, they would kick you out,
‘Cause you were lying in the bed that you made when you broke your vow.
But then you woke in the wasteland of the truth you told,
And you turned to see some stayed, and they were bright as a band of gold.But I came so close, I came so close,
I came so close to letting go, to letting go.But there is no shadow on the silver stars,
And the colder the night is, well, the closer the heavens are.So don’t let go ’cause this I know,
Don’t let go, this I know for sure,
Don’t let go ’cause this I know,
This I know for sure ‘,…cause there’s still hope.
